786

We have successfully completed our migration to RAM-only VPN infrastructure - Mullvad VPN (mullvad.net)

submitted 1 year ago by Voyager@psychedelia.ink to c/technology@lemmy.world

93 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] jeena@jemmy.jeena.net 19 points 1 year ago

Just for my understanding when they boot such a server, where does it get it's operating system from? Over the network from a different computer which has a hard drive or some read only ROM on the server or what?

[-] UFO64@lemmy.world 36 points 1 year ago

This can be handled a few different ways.

You can boot from a HDD and then just not ever write data back to it. This would be the most trivial solution, and it's something people do with their Pi's a lot to avoid SD card failure.
You could network boot, pull the OS from the network at startup. Fun fact, this is how some rockets fly! No onboard persistent storage needed. Everything boots into and runs from ram the whole 10 ish minutes of operation.
You COULD do a ROM as you suggested, but that's a LOT of ROM. Seems odd to do imho.

[-] uis@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

16MiB is enough to hold entire Linux distro. Example: OpenWRT

[-] jeena@jemmy.jeena.net 1 points 1 year ago

I remember that there was a ROM in the Amiga 500 which had the kickstart software on it which you'd load from a diskette on the predecessor the Amiga 1000. This made it much faster to boot because you would not need to switch diskettes in the middle of the boot.

[-] Kazumara@feddit.de 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Click the first link in the article, in the older post they talk about their stboot bootloader. It does what you suspect, loads the OS image from a different computer which has signed base images.

this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023

786 points (99.0% liked)

Technology

60070 readers

3706 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS